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Microsoft, RSS, & Sock Puppets

People are making unduly much of Microsoft’s announcement tomorrow that it is extending RSS to support other forms of information beyond news. Is it really a revelation to people than you can and should be thinking about RSS for more things than blogs?
If so, then I’m not getting my point across very well. I’ve only been saying that at conferences since 1999. Plus I wrote the same thing in my “Feeding Time” piece in Harvard Business Review last year. And I have written repeatedly here about “dark matter” in the information universe, which is the idea that syndication technologies, like RSS, are great for handling lexical driftnets where you monitor all sorts of changes in informational state, of which news is just one subclass.
Now, however, it’s news that lightweight syndication is a universal information transport useful for more things than blogs? Oye, maybe I need to start using cartoons and sock puppets.